Sketchnoting keynotes at the #Eurocall2018 – the whys and hows

So… Since I have a master’s degree in Nordic philology and I’ve gained pedagogical competence, I have a past career as a language teacher AND I used to work as an e-learning designer, too, I think blend in pretty nicely into the attendee crowd of the EuroCALL conference. This year the EuroCALL conferenceis organized here in Jyväskylä, in my home town, and my home university, University of Jyväskylä, is the organizer. So it’s quite natural that they asked me to do the real-time live sketchnoting at the event. And of course I said yes.

Giant screen, shaking hands

The keynote presentations of the event were held in a traditional university lecture hall. The hall has two white screens so we used one screen for the speaker’s slides and the other screen for showing my workflow in real-time for the audience. This is a pretty sweaty setting as both screens are equally big. The audience could see my lousy drawings and sloppy English spelling real-time, as said. And on a VERY big screen. Luckily, I am able to embrace my mistakes and I don’t need to cry myself to sleep after a gig like this 🙂 Technically everything worked well: we connected my iPad to the projector with a VGA adapter and as we all know, the VGA works even after the nuclear holocaust.

Conference host Peppi Taalas (she’s great, btw, a lot of fun!) said that I’m a language teacher in denial. Who knows 🙂 It’s sure however that even though I nowadays work full time as an entrepreneur in graphic recording business, I haven’t forgotten my dark past as a language teacher.